Opera singers embrace a relaxed diet
When one of my guests says that Toronto cycles through the same opera productions — La Bohème three times in 12 years — and that he is now seeing the same shows again, I suggest that he’s batting around.
Does batting around mean what I think it does, that the baseball players have all had a turn and now we’re seeing the same ones again? It is tremendously satisfying that no one at the table, not opera singers Charlotte Burrage or Clarence Frazer and not my two opera buff friends, can confirm it. We are too classy to know how sports work. And as there’s absolutely no information about baseball on the Internet, we’ll never know.
Offstage, Frazer and Burrage are a couple. On stage, they’ll be playing Figaro and Rosina in the May 15 performance of The Barber of Seville by the Canadian Opera Company’s Ensemble Studio.
There ought to be some Seville oranges on the table, but it’s Minneola season. Instead, there’s a platter of finger food.
I cannot slow down my snacking speed, reaching again and again for candied nuts, medjool dates stuffed with Taleggio cheese, warm olives, Grey Owl cheese (spread on corn rolls from the Jamaican patty shop because my bakery was closed for Easter) and bricks of roasted squash dipped in a spicy caramel.
Burrage and Frazer eat at a much less ferocious pace. Maybe it’s because they’re polite guests (I never see either of their elbows touch the table).
After all, neither of them has a restrictive performer’s diet.
“I eat everything. I don’t have any crazy regimen on days of shows,” says Burrage, biting a date in half. “There are people that have so many rules. Then you get sick because you’re thinking about it. You can’t get sick in our job. Your chords are what make you money.”
“Five to 10 thousand dollars for that night, you just lose because you have a cough,” says Frazer. “That’s why a lot of people will try to push through and sing with a cold.”
In case you’re thinking they make that much for one night’s work, no, that’s typical pay structure for the whole production, including rehearsal time. So missing the performance can mean forfeiting months of pay. That’s why they train like athletes.
“I was actually really into competitive swimming,” says Burrage. “It helps my breathing so much. I think it’s the best cardio you can do.”
As a swimmer myself, I drag Burrage into a digression about spin turns, but I have a swim coach coming for dinner next week so we’ll table that for now.
“I had no intentions of being an opera singer,” laughs Burrage. “I wanted to be a marine biologist. But then I started theory lessons. I was taking piano and singing and I was in choir and it just completely consumed everything I did by the time I was in high school. It just kept escalating, adding one technique on to the next. And then I spent eight years in university doing opera.”
She estimates about 65 students a year attend the undergrad program she took at the University of Toronto, with maybe three having international careers.
The Studio Ensemble is the end of their long education.
“The Studio program we’re in is that transition,” says Frazer, “bridging the gap between school and becoming a full-fledged professional.”
Their training is taxing, nine days on with one day off. While any professional singer hones their vocal chords, opera singers need the power to perform for a crowd of thousands, without amplification. Be- tween rehearsals, specialists teach lessons in voice, acting and language. Personal trainers customize workouts to avoid building muscles that will interfere with singing.
“You don’t want abs because it affects your breathing,” says Burrage. “Sit-ups flex your neck. You don’t want to build any muscles there. It’s really hard to breathe with a six-pack.” I’ll never know. As I boil the pappardelle I rolled out this afternoon, mixing it with a roasted rapini pesto, I picture an opera body, an image of barrelshaped Pavarotti (OK, John Candy as Pavarotti in an SCTV parody of The Godfather) eating a whole wheel of Provolone cheese.
“I used to be quite a bit heavier,” says Burrage. “And the breathing was a lot easier. The fat supports when you breathe out.”
But opera bodies are slimming down to adapt to modern staging.
“The opera we’re doing now is so physical,” she says. “We are running around the stage, jumping, climbing. And you’re singing while you’re running around. And trying to look relaxed and be relaxed.”
Fraser sums it up with a selfdescriptive term. “No park ’n’ bark.” The discipline is gruelling. Few make it.
“If you have any idea of having a normal, get-married, have-children and own-a-house life,” warns Bur- rage. “With weekends, vacation time . . .” “Stat holidays,” jumps in Frazer. “A lot of couples, if they’re two opera singers together, don’t have a home. If they’re both in the peak of their careers, they just travel all the time. It’s not easy on relationships, family. You have to give up a lot in order to have it.”
“You can’t have a career in music just because you love music,” says Frazer. “That’s not good enough. Music has to be something that you cannot live without.”
Spice Candied Nuts
For the platter of snacks I put out, you don’t need a recipe for warming olives with a few rosemary branches or stuffing dates with cheese. Here’s how I make candied nuts. It’s very easy and they keep for a long time.
1 cup (250 mL) almonds
1 cup (250 mL) walnuts
4 tbsp (60 mL) sugar
1 tsp (5 mL) salt
1 tsp (5 mL) black pepper
4 tsp (20 mL) cumin
1 tbsp (15 mL) chili powder
2 egg whites
Preheat oven to 325 F/160 C.
Spread almonds and walnuts on a baking sheet. Bake until lightly toasted, about 5-10 minutes. (Bonus: toast and grind cumin seeds for extra flavour.)
Transfer toasted nuts to a mixing bowl.
Combine with sugar, salt, pepper, cumin and chili powder. Adjust to taste. Blend in egg whites. Line baking tray with parchment paper and spread out nuts.
Bake, turning nuts every 10 minutes. Bake until sugar and egg mixture becomes a shell, about 25 minutes. The shell will be sticky when they come out of the oven. It will take a few minutes of cooling for them to harden.
Makes 2 cups (500 mL).